For me, I can manually link all the ports linking to -gui to the new libraries. Its a bit of work, but doable, or just --disable-imagemagick.

For the way it is now, there should be an automated way for applications to detect whether -gui is linked against ImageMagick or not, so that they know whether have to link against it too or not, without the need to rewrite their GNUmakefiles.

What configuration magic do you are talking about?

For the other suggestion that you have, I don't know, how much work would that be? But as far as I understand, it sounds like kind of plugins that register for image types, which sounds like a fairly reasonable way to go.

I am sure that this bug can be easily solved by some configuration magic, but there is also a different solution possible. One that I would prefer. We could move the ImageMagick code out of GNUstep gui into a filter service. A filter service is basically a converter that takes its input from the pasteboard and puts the result back there. NSImageRep is supposed to use filters to handle unknown formats. We never included code for this, but Richard provided and example implementation for a filter service:

devmodules/usr-apps/examples/gui/ExampleService/

For this suggestion to work two components are needed
- support for filtered images in NSImageRep and maybe NSBitmapImageRep
- the filter services themselves (I would not only put the ImageMagick stuff into one, but add one for Ghostscript as well)